


oh my mother, she is a mountain

by maplemood



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Mentors, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Team as Family, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-04-29 01:26:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14462145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: She’s used to sleeping alone.





	oh my mother, she is a mountain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/gifts).



> Thanks so much for all your terrific prompts! I had a lot of trouble choosing between them, and changed my mind a couple of times, but eventually decided to go with Rey and Leia, because I also wish they could have had more time together so badly. Hope you like this one. :)

She’s used to sleeping alone. Bred for it, really; even on her loneliest nights, curled shivering in the guts of a crumbling engine like some bony fossil, she could never find the energy (or, she knows now, the imagination) to remember a time when she woke up to a warm body beside her. An arm draped across her shoulders. A voice in her ear.

_Shh, hush, it’s all right. It’s all right, Rey._

_Go back to sleep._

On Jakku, touch is not cheap. Sleep is not cheap—they are both things to be weighed, measured, portioned out as grudgingly as water. And no scavenger worth the food in their belly or the clothes on their back would ever share water.

Though sometimes the lucky ones will stumble across a stream in the desert.

+

If anyone’s to blame, it’s Han Solo for not betting on a ship with more bunks. Nobody is worrying about this particular problem as they take off from Crait, but time flies when you’re fleeing the last stand of a tattered rebellion, and the Falcon’s night cycle falls three hours into their jump through hyperspace.  

“We’ll make do,” says the General, as stolidly optimistic as ever. “There’s probably a hundred shelves and crannies on this rattletrap that’ll serve us just as well. And I’m sure you two won’t mind sharing a bunk,” she adds, her chin jerking in Finn and Poe’s direction.

“Lei—General, please,” says Poe, but for a second he looks the farthest from heartbroken of any of them. Rey smiles, returns his bemused shrug, and tries not to choke on her own jealousy. At least not visibly. She and Finn sleeping back-to-back in the same bunk, under the same blanket, sharing space and breath: it was a pretty picture while it lasted.

“Yes, Lieutenant, he does snore. Is that really important right now?” The General waves Kaydel Ko Connix off to her bunk (the one right under Chewbacca’s) and turns to stare at Rey expectantly. “Han used to tell me I snored louder than a Wookie,” she says. “We can find you a pair of earplugs if you want.”

“Oh,” says Rey. “Oh, um, I don’t—I don’t sleep,” she blurts.

The General raises one eyebrow. “At all?”

 _Kriff,_ she thinks as a helpless blush prickles up to her hairline. _She’s so_ good.

“Well, you’ll have to teach me that Jedi mind trick some time. What I wouldn’t give for more hours in a day.”

“I meant…” and the General’s face doesn’t change, doesn’t once flicker in its warmth as Rey stammers, which just makes her stammer worse, gods all damn it. “I do sleep, um, just not...well...I sleep alone. I’m used to sleeping alone.”

The second it’s out, her stomach plummets like a stone—the General isn’t some rot-toothed scavenger looking to steal her warmth and her scrap and cop a feel along the way. The General, who’s a politician, a princess, the strongest, steadiest woman she’s ever known, just reached a hand out to her, and Rey as good as bit it. “I’m sorry.” Her face burns even hotter.

“No need,” the General answers, her voice brisk, as though Rey has presented her with an interesting, but not especially taxing, puzzle to be solved. “There’s no shame in sleeping alone. And getting used to it—frankly, I think it’s a talent.”

Rey does not think back to the sight of her wrapped in Han’s arms, the both of them so weary and old, grooves and wrinkles fitting together in a perfect whole. The kind of old she’d rarely seen on Jakku, where age can hold out only so long against the sand and sun.

“One I’ve never mastered,” says the General. She cocks her head, studies Rey with the kind of compassion she’ll never expect and never really know how to deal with. “Do you want to sleep alone?” she asks.

Rey swallows. “I have nightmares.”

“So do I.”

The lights over their heads, already dimmed, buzz to the low blue glow of the midnight hour. Around them, the corridors rustle with sighs, groans, the flap of blankets. From around the corner, Rey distinctly hears a hiss, followed by, “Dammit, Poe! Your feet are freezing!”

“I don’t know if I snore,” she says.

The General smiles. “We’ll get two pairs of earplugs, then. Just in case.”

+

“It would be a shame to toss the little one out.”

“It would not.” Rey scoops the porg out of their cranny and sets it on the grated walkway. “Shoo!”

The creature squawks.

She squawks back. “Go on! Chewie’s in his bunk, go bother him for a bit!”

The General chuckles as the porg, feathers ruffled to twice its original size, stumps off down the walkway. “Not one for sentiment, huh?”

“It’s _our_ bed,” Rey argues, shoving the half-built nest out of the way to make room for her pillow. “Chewie’s too soft on them—they’re practically taking over the ship.”

“There’s room enough for us all.” The General sets her own pillow and blanket beside Rey’s.

“Barely,” Rey shoots back. She quiets as the General eases down beside her. Joints pop in the older woman’s legs; her movements are slower, more labored than Rey remembers. She wonders if it has something to do with those few minutes spent in space that Finn told her about. “Are you all right?” she asks. The blush that hasn’t quite subsided (probably never will, at this point) flares up, but the General only shrugs.

“Under the circumstances? As all right as I’ll ever be. You?”

“I’m tired,” Rey admits. She knows she won’t have to explain how it runs deeper than sleepiness—the weariness creaking through her bones feels almost as much like hopelessness, within a hair’s breadth of despair. Despair is a death sentence on Jakku. She never allowed herself to entertain it there; here, among the Resistance, the only hope she has left, it claws up her back, sinks its teeth into her neck like a desert cat.

She needs something to do. Quick.

Rey’s eyes light on the coils of the General’s hair.

No.

Oh, kriff. She’s already embarrassed herself more than should be humanly possible.

She scoots a little closer. “Would you like me to take out those, uh…” she gropes for the right word and comes up with the approximate one instead. “Those twists?”

“In my hair?” The General’s fingers flutter up as if she’s forgotten all about them. She lets out a resigned sound, halfway between a yawn and a sigh, then inclines her head. “If you don’t mind. Thank you.”

Rey works carefully, plucking out what must be a billion hair pins before the General’s updo comes loose. It spills over her face in a heavy, iron-gray wave streaked through with a few fine strands of brown. Rey searches for the last few pins in the twist that sits at the base of her neck, trying not to yank, knowing she probably is anyway. It’s late. Her fingers are fumbling. “Sorry.”

“You’re doing fine.” The General rolls a crick from her neck as soon as the last pin’s pulled out. Combing the mass back from her face with both hands, she says, “Turn around.”

Rey obeys. In a few quick movements, the General’s undone her ponytail—which, to be fair, didn’t require any hair pins or elaborate twists. Her fingers catch at a tangle near the nape of Rey’s neck; she feels back and works through it, gently.

“Don’t bother. It’s late.”

“You say that and it’ll be a mat the size of your fist come morning. There.” Instead of lifting her hand away, the General lets her fingers rest on Rey’s nape for a moment. They’re rough, and warm, and Rey lets herself lean into the touch, lets herself imagine this a different story, light-years and worlds away, far from junk and drinking money. Then she pulls herself straight. There’s no use dwelling on stories, there never has been.

“Ben and I used to fix each other’s hair when he was younger,” the General says. Rey didn’t ask, so maybe she’s embarrassed for letting it slip anyway. At any rate, her voice catches. Just a little. “It kept him from bothering me the rest of the time while I got ready in the morning; he’d send me off to the Senate with pigtails.”

Given all she’s been through with Ben these past few days, Rey doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, she decides on neither, focusing all her attention on punching her pillow into shape.

Well, most of it. “I hope you put his hair in pigtails, then,” she says. “That’s only fair.”

The General laughs. Softly.  “Oh, I did. Then he’d come to me mad because Han was laughing at him, so I’d have to tell him his poor father had no sense of fashion.”

+

Touch. It’s not worth much by itself. The closeness that can come with it—that is precious, weighed in brushes, flicks. A hand to help you over an unsteady pile of scrap. Fingers to coat your sunburns in cool, pungent bacta gel. A whisper to tickle the fine hairs inside your ear.

_Not here. We can’t leave her here._

(It’s a dream. Not a good one.)

Arms circle her without weight or hope. _Please. Nothing grows here._

(If it were real, she would remember this. She would scream, cry, she would feel _something.)_

She would remember her mother’s touch.

+

They did find two pairs of earplugs tossed in with a jumble of other clutter in the compartment by the pilot’s seat. Rey lasts two minutes before yanking hers out. The soft mumbling noises of everybody else keep her up (she’s used to sleeping alone —she’s not used to sharing a space with so many people), but the silence is worse. In it, she feels balanced on a knife’s edge.

The General snores. As loudly as a Wookie, at least.

For a long time, Rey lies stiff as a board. The corner they’ve bedded down in is cramped; one twitch and they’ll be touching. Rey doesn’t think about that.

(She doesn’t think that she wants to sleep curled back-to-back with the General. Badly.)

If Rey touches her, she'll probably wake up.

An hour in, though, her foot spasms, jerks out like she’s tripped on some invisible step. It brushes against the General’s, a brush that’s halfway to a kick. “Sor—” Rey starts to hiss.

The General’s snore stutters a bit. She doesn’t move.

 _Oh,_ thinks Rey. Then, _Don’t do it. Don’t you dare._

She worms her hand out from under the covers.

_No! You idiot!_

Rey pokes at the General’s shoulder.

Not a flicker.

“General,” she whispers, not as loud as she might.

Nothing.

“Leia,” she whispers, louder.

The General mumbles something and rolls onto her side. Now she’s facing Rey, eyes still closed, the folds and wrinkles of her face gone slack, her gray hair a tangle around it. She looks as old as Rey has ever seen her. More grandmother than mother.

All the same, her face makes Rey ache.

 _Oh, go ahead, you kriffing idiot._  

Slowly, shamefully, she huddles in closer, till her forehead almost brushes the General’s. She closes her eyes. _This is it,_ she thinks. _This is as close as I’ll ever get._    

She thinks, _Ben, you’re twice the idiot I am for turning your back on her._

She thinks, _I’ll be up early. Before anyone else; she won’t know._

For now, she feels the warmth, the weight of another body beside hers, and she closes her eyes tighter and she imagines arms cradling her, and a voice, unremembered yet unforgotten, whispering in her ear.

+

“Rey. Rey!”

The words are loud, very firm. They hook into the soft, bloody tangle somewhere past the darkness and shrieking chaos—she’s back in the throne room, suspended in the air, her ribs split, forced open wide like the jaws of a trap, and the hot air razors over her throbbing heart, though it won’t throb for much longer, will it, no—no, _no_ she’s not, she’s on the _Falcon_ and they’re flying, fleeing, as fast as they can—

—and the General’s hands are cupped to her face.

They’re as rough as her fingers.

They’re the softest things Rey has ever felt.

“A dream,” the General says. Her hair falls over both of them. It tickles Rey’s cheeks and her neck. It smells like oil and sweat and the salt from Crait. “A nightmare, like you told me. Just a nightmare, Rey. Nothing more.”

“All right,” she says, “all right,” but her voice shakes. Like her entire body shakes, like the phantom pains still shuddering up her spine. She closes her eyes. Opens them. Squeezes out a deep breath. She blinks up at the other woman. “Sorry for waking you.”

The General’s face changes. Melts, Rey would say, only that’s not the right word. Not at all. It softens.

It glows.

“You strong girl,” she says. “You strong, brave, stupid girl. Come here.”

It shouldn’t surprise her. It shouldn’t, yet it does, when tears spring to her eyes, prickling, boiling-hot. Salt or not, tears are water. Water is never wasted.

“Come here,” the General repeats, and suddenly Rey is squeezed in the warm circle of her arms, suddenly Rey is _—again—_ ready to crack apart, and suddenly she is sobbing, quietly but furiously, with her face buried in the curve of the General’s shoulder, her snot and tears smearing the woman’s collar, _kriff—_

“Nothing you can bring up that this isn’t already stained with,” the General murmurs, one hand rubbing a warm circle between her shoulder blades. “It’s all right, Rey. It’s all right.”

Her tears pass like a storm, leaving her exhausted and parched. Like some small animal snatched up by a sand hawk, then dropped, dashed against a rock. The General is all warm stone, bedrock, a foundation, and Rey is so pathetic, so pitifully stupid, but she can’t let go.

Not yet.

“Why did he leave you?” she finally mutters.

“Ben?” The General lies back, not seeming to mind the weight of Rey’s head resting on her shoulder, so Rey doesn’t move it. “He thought I was weak. That I was a fool, that he knew better than me.”

“Then he was the fool.”

“Maybe so,” she answers, her voice noncommittal, if not uncertain. “But it’s the fate of most children to grow beyond their mothers.” She squeezes Rey’s arm.

+

Night cycle, and the _Falcon_ hums.

Blankets rustle.

Porgs squawk.

A corridor away there’s a flutter, a rush as somebody else bursts awake, panting and sobbing. Is it the girl she hasn’t actually met yet? Rose? Another rush of voices as Finn and Poe rouse themselves to quiet her, and brief silence, and another corridor down, a murmur from Kaydel, an answering grunt from Chewie.

The General sleeps, her arm draped across Rey’s shoulders.

Rey lies awake in the dark. She lies, and she thinks, for a very long time.  

**Author's Note:**

> Title from lyrics in the song "Bloodlines" by Terry Allen.


End file.
